There are students who find life beyond Red Solo cups

By Alex Stratyner

It’s Friday night, and John, a junior at Haverford College, is hiding in a cabinet.
This is no small feat for a fully grown twentysomething male, but so far his plan is working: it’s been over 15 minutes and no one has found him.
Outside, parties are in full swing. Students who have spent the past five days walking to and from class and the library have put their academic commitments on hold.
Tonight, they are pursuing something different and far more easy to define than the illusive “intellectual commitment” that consumes their academic work week.
They want to get wasted. Shit-faced. Trashed. Smashed. Blasted. Hammered. Drunk.
Call it what you want, but it comes in a red Solo cup.
Dressed in their Friday night best, students filter in and out of dorms, headed toward wherever the sound of muffled dance music is coming from, the bass vibrations guiding the way. Girls spotted in sweat pants during the week have pulled their high heels out of the closet and now have smoky eyes, pouty lips, and styled hair. Their shoes clack against the sidewalk as they make their way toward the night’s destination.
For many of these 18 to 22-year-olds, what’s in store for tonight is illegal, but underage drinking – and any of the poor choices to follow – are explained away with six little words: “It’s part of the college experience.”
Continue reading →

This is the night to shine for two new members of Haverford’s premier a cappella group.

By Mara Miller

It’s 9:10 the night before the show, and Leo Sussan doesn’t know his lines.
Other members of the Humtones, Haverford College’s oldest and one of its most popular a cappella groups, are getting a tiny bit tense. In less than 24 hours they have to sing a little, dance a little, perform corny skits, show corny videos-in other words, give students what they expect from a big Humtones show.
The 10 ‘tones sit in a circle on a small elevated platform on one side of the student center, which is just an old gymnasium with a few comfy chairs and a new TV mounted on the wall. They are rehearsing one of several comedic skits for their end-of-semester performance. Sussan, though a sophomore, is one of two new members welcomed into the group just this fall. In the skit, he’s supposed to be portraying an attendee of a Vampire Affinity Group meeting, where the Humtones drop pun after pun in mockery of the Twilight saga in addition to inside jokes about various campus personalities. But his cue comes, and Sussan is silent. “Uhhhh….”
“Dude,” says Mike Gelberg, a senior Humtone. “I know you’ve got a lot going on, but you’ve gotta memorize your stuff.”
“I know, I know,” Sussan mumbles.
They make it through the scene, but nobody is thrilled. “That was pretty terrible,” says Gelberg.
There’s a five minute break, and they scatter to get a drink or go to the bathroom. One remains in the gym, pacing laps around the stage with hands in pockets, mouthing to himself what could be his lines or lyrics for the performance. It is Dan Ikeda, a freshman, and the other novice in the group.

Winter intramural basketball is the place to be at Haverford College

By Jordan Schilit

 The fields of Haverford College are all covered with an abundance of snow; temperatures fall and students huddle inside their dorms. But shoes are still being laced and baskets sunk and the gym inside Gooding Arena is just getting warmed-up.
No, this isn’t the NCAA. March Madness won’t tip-off until three months from now. But don’t think basketball throwing, breakaway tackling, and trash talking are out of the picture. You can’t ignore the on-court antics. And some soak in the drama. But this particular basketball league is generally fun and enjoyable.
“Sometimes IBB gets a little heated,” said A league leading “Dot Com” Captain Nathan Karnovsky. “Guys get into arguments but after the game ends, it’s as if they never happened. IBB provides a fun, competitive outlet.”
Intramural Basketball (IBB) at Haverford College is a tradition that dates back at least into the 1980s. This year, IBB has two leagues. The “A” league is more competitive. Teams are usually made up of varsity players from other intercollegiate sports. The “B” league is more casual. Teams are usually made up of students who have little basketball experience. There are a total of 20 teams — seven in the A league and 13 in the B league. Each team plays approximately 10 games throughout the regular season. In addition, the A league has an organized playoff system for the four teams who end the regular season on top of the standings.
IBB is heavy with players who play varsity in other sports, but turn to basketball during their off season from baseball, soccer, lacrosse – you name it.
The A league is entirely male this year. Dot Com, a primarily non-varsity athlete sophomore team, currently sits atop the pecking order in the standings. Haverford Baseball has two A league teams. Men’s Lacrosse has split up into two teams as well. Soccer and freshman varsity athletes have also entered teams.
In the B league, teams are often coed and sometimes entirely female. They range from the women’s varsity lacrosse, field hockey, and soccer teams to junior varsity men’s squads. Some lineups are filled with pick-up basketball naturals, whereas others have players with no playing experience.
Haverford Basketball captain Matt Palmer ’10 is the current IBB commissioner. He organizes the A and B leagues and determines their schedules. He makes sure to watch every IBB game during the season.
“I have noticed that IBB is taken very seriously at Haverford,” Palmer said. “Most teams in the A league consistently hold practices.”
Both the A and B league teams have two games scheduled per week. The first games are either on Wednesday or Thursday. The second games are always on Sunday. All games are played in the Calvin Gooding ’84 Arena. Continue reading →

What is that smell, students ask. Here is the answer. 

By Harper Hubbeling

You can smell them from the stairwell.
Students unconsciously wrinkle their noses as they haul heavy backpacks up the three flights to their Tuesday morning Intro Psychology lecture in the Koshland Integrated Natural Science Center at Haverford College.
Most don’t know where – or what – the stench comes from.
“Smells like sewer rat,” one boy grumbles.
Close. The smell is mice: 1,000 of them.
Two flights above the psychology classrooms, on the deserted fifth floor of the biology wing, behind two heavy steel doors with restricted key card access, is room S501. The mouse room.
“The mouse suite is pretty bare,” said Eliza Reiss, a senior biology major and the student manager who is in charge of maintaining the rodents residing in room S501.
Inside, overhead fluorescent lights flood concrete floors. Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves line the walls. The shelves hold 200 cages. Each cage holds two to six lab mice. Bend over and you can see them through the sides of their Plexiglas cages: squirming, tunneling, and compulsively scratching their flimsy ears.
While most Haverford students don’t even know this room exists, a select few know it well.

Working in S501
Reiss spends three hours a week in S501. She feeds, waters, and cleans cages for the biology department mice and oversees the other student workers. She enjoys the job. She says she, “likes spending time with the mice,” especially when other aspects of her life at Haverford get busy and hectic.
“I do talk to them sometimes when I’m there alone,” Reiss admits.
Brian Suh, a junior biology major, is another student who frequents S501. He cares for the psychology department’s mice.
“It’s not very complex work,” said Suh, “so I can just chill and listen to music.”
While Suh admits that the, “repetition sometimes gets to (him),” he also says he enjoys the job.
“I get to do my own thing,” he says.
Both Suh and Reiss agree on their least favorite part of the job.
“The smell! I hate the smell!” says Reiss.
“If I go in my clothes will smell really bad,” said Suh. Suh and Reiss plan their hours based on shower schedules –working late at night or right before athletic practice.
But while the mice in S501 may reek like any other rodent, they are not your average field mouse. Most of these mice have been inbred for twenty generations.
Twenty generations of inbreeding makes for very polite, docile, but not exceptionally bright mice.
“They are slow,” said Reiss.
These mice don’t bite. And they have almost no sense of self-preservation.
“When they escape they just sit on top of their cages,” said Nicole Cunningham, a biology research assistant at Haverford, recently given the title of “colony manager.” Continue reading →

A surprising number of Bryn Mawr students struggle with eating disorders 

By Clare Mullaney

If you saw Bryn Mawr College senior Joanne Mitchell walking to class or crossing Lancaster Avenue, you would think she was fine.

Her long, blonde hair might stand out, or her sense of style: a fashionable grey cardigan over a graphic tee of Hillary Clinton.  When people speak with her, they find her bright, witty, and compassionate.  They might think that for her, life is easy.

But, that’s anything but true.  For Mitchell, every day is a battle. 

Since sixth grade, Mitchell, whose true name she prefers not to be used in the article, has been struggling with anorexia.  For years, her life has been defined by depression, anxiety, and obsessions with weight and food. 

“If I was forced to eat, I would throw up or over exercise,” she said. 

Most people at Bryn Mawr don’t know about Mitchell’s struggles and many students, including Mitchell herself, complain about the lack of discussion concerning eating disorders on campus. 

Like Mitchell, 10 million females and one million males struggle with an eating disorder, according to the National Association of Eating Disorders.  The organization defines anorexia nervosa as life-threatening disorder characterized by self-starvation and excessive weight loss.  Bulimia nervosa is also life threatening and is defined by a cycle of behaviors such as self-induced vomiting to compensate for binge eating.  Unlike bulimia, people with binge eating disorder binge eat without compensatory measures to undo the excessive eating.

  Continue reading →

Haverford College now has 7 – count ’em – 7 a cappella groups

By Mara Miller

Haverford College likes to pat itself on the back for things like its varsity cricket team (the only one in America) and the witty and attention-grabbing 13-mph speed-limit signs on campus.

 Another of the small college’s claims to fame is its national record for the number of a cappella singing groups per student capita.
For years, there have been five well-established groups at Haverford: two male, two female, and one coed. Add to that a handful of groups made up of students from Haverford as well as Bryn Mawr and even Swarthmore and, well, if you want to sing you’ve got a lot of options.
But in the last two years, that smorgasboard has grown even larger with the addition of two more a cappella groups to the Haverford and Bryn Mawr consortium: Counterpoint, whose name itself sounds like a challenge to the status quo, and the Mainliners, whose name refers either to the college’s ritzy environs or to a method of heroin injection, whichever you prefer.
At first, Haverford didn’t take so well to these new groups. A cappella is the stuff of tradition, and being accepted by the S-Chords or the Humtones, the two revered all-male groups, is like getting into the coolest frat. You can’t just build a new frat. Or can you?

Counterpoint was founded in 2007 by two Bryn Mawr students disgruntled with their former troupe, the Night Owls. Counterpoint started out as coed, but is now all women, though its members attend both Bryn Mawr and Haverford. Of the original male contingent, one left to focus on academics, one graduated, and one got into the S-Chords, “which he’d dreamt about since birth,” said now-senior Ryan Mulligan, the last man standing. When Counterpoint made the all-female switch, Mulligan hung around to help with administrative work.
He said that Counterpoint has always struggled for recognition, battling the assumption that people only start new groups because they can’t get into the “real” ones.
Continue reading →

Three stories on the diversity of college life.

Beth Curtiss, whose beat is religion, has a piece about students who organize Quaker Meeting for Worship at Haverford College.

Kaori Hatama, who covers international students, has a story on how these students adjust  — or don’t — to American college food.

Mriganka Lulla, whose beat is fashion, has a piece about Sarah Kim, a Bryn Mawr student with a finely-honed sense of fashion.

Bringing Haverford College’s Quaker past into the present

By Beth Curtiss
The living room in the college apartment was small but full of light from the windows. Mismatched chairs and futons sat in a circle around the edges.
A large poster, hand-colored in crayon, adorned one wall, filled with illustrations surrounding the words “simplicity, peace, integrity, community, and equality.”
Students wearing sweatpants and old t-shirts trickled in. Some came out of their rooms with wet hair. Others turned the corner from the kitchen with mugs of coffee. Several hurried in through the front door, shrugging off light jackets. There are about 20 in all.
It was Sunday at noon, and it was time for the Haverford Quaker Community, or QuaC, to hold its weekly Meeting for Worship in Quaker House.
Molly Minden, a Haverford sophomore, explained the basics of Quaker belief to a pair of visitors. Quakers believe in something called the Inner Light, she said.
Many believe that this Inner Light is the manifestation of God or the divine. Worship consists of listening to it, and, if moved to do so, speaking any messages that come from this Inner Light.

A bench in a traditional Quaker meeting room

Minden soon called the meeting to order. Students hurried to sit down on the futons, chairs, and footstools. Silence fell.
For the next few minutes a few more students trickled in and took chairs from the kitchen, enlarging the circle. But the silence did not lift.
Some closed their eyes. Some stared ahead. A few fidgeted for a few minutes, and then quieted their bodies. One sat reading for a few minutes, and then put down the book and shut his eyes. A few sipped their coffee intermittently.

Silent moments

Time passed. Still. the silence did not lift.
As if at some unseen signal, a sigh suddenly rippled around the room. The students sat up straighter, laughed, shook hands with their neighbors, and exchanged murmurs of greeting. An hour had passed, and worship was over.
Noah Lavine, a junior, suggested a round of names. He also invited everyone to share anything that they had been thinking about that had not rise to the level of a message to be spoken during worship. Continue reading →

One tip is to accessorize, accessorize, accessorize, according to Sarah Kim

By Mriganka Lulla

“Even when I am already fifteen minutes late to class, I just cannot leave my room unless I have eyeliner on and my hair is done!” said a rueful Sarah Kim..
The onset of winter has the flowers fading away and if you are one of those individuals that miss the presence of these brightly colored flowers in your life, a word of advice- befriend Sarah Kim. Tiny flowers dot her umbrella, the hem of her high-waist skirt, the silver ring on her finger and even the clips in her hair.
She stops suddenly, in the midst of heavy rain storm, and despite the drops falling around her, takes a moment to look down at herself and then up at her umbrella and say: ” I never realized just how many flower-y things I own!”
With that, she turns and smiles widely; bright as the flowers she was talking about.
Kim seems to be well suited to all sorts of weather conditions. She would also make a good and impartial judge. Contrary to what one would expect, she cannot pick a favorite: East Coast weather versus West Coast weather. There is absolutely no bias towards the West, which is surprising because Orange County of sunny California is her home. Eternal sunshine as opposed to rain, hail, snow and sleet?
” What can I say,” she said.” Seasons are my reason for fashion!”
Multi faceted is the perfect adjective for Kim, as she is an apt example of the ‘geeks’ that do also read Vogue. She does not let her Pre-Med workload interfere with her role as Clothe and Make-Up Stylist for ‘Hepburn’s Closet’, Bryn Mawr College’s online fashion magazine.

Sarah Kim

In Bryn Mawr, ” fashion meets function” whereas in California, “fashion is just fashion.” said Kim. Fall and winter do serve the purpose; it seems, of allowing fashion fanatics like Kim to wander away from the bareness of bathing suits and tiny shorts. “Bundling up in cute winter coats is unique of the East Coast, and they serve the purpose of keeping you warm

High fashion research
Fashion is Kim’s domain, and she comes prepared to rule. It takes time and effort to maintain her position on the throne, and Kim regularly spends hours reading fashion magazines and visiting fashion blogs such as ‘The Satorialist’ and ‘Garance a dore’. “I know it’s high fashion versus local fashion, but the important bit is to notice the similar trends,” Kim explained. “You have to look at high fashion in a way that is applicable to students. You have to let the trends trickle down!” Continue reading →

Adjusting to American college food can be hard on international students

By Kaori Hatama

Seung Ah Bae and three other friends started their way to the Bryn Mawr R100 SEPTA station on Friday evening carrying big backpacks and bags that were nearly empty..
“It’s going to be packed on our way back,” said Bae a Bryn Mawr College freshman from Korea.
Riding the R100 for 20 minutes, they got off at the 69st St. Terminal and walked a couple of minutes until they finally reached H-Mart, a Korean supermarket in Upper Darby, which borders Philadelphia..
Normally, there would be fruits, vegetables and bread stacked near the entrance of a supermarket, but not at H-Mart. Here, the entrance is filled with stacks of rice instead. The smell of kimchi, the spicy Korean cabbage dish, is also obvious after passing through the automatic doors into the supermarket.
“Let’s eat first before shopping,” said Bae, hopping on the escalator to a second-floor food court.

Fish on display at the Upper Darby H-Mart

“We always sit here,” said Bae settling to the table nearest to one of the shops. After looking through the menus, Bae stood up and headed to one of the shops. She switched her language to Korean and ordered traditional Korean food with rice.
“We really miss rice,” said Bae. “That’s why we come here and eat on weekends.”
Adjusting to the food is one of the challenges freshmen face in adjusting to their new life at college. And it’s doubly true for international students, who grew up with their countries’ traditional food and have to adjust to a new country, a new school and a new diet.
Take rice as an example, one of the staples in Asian cuisine. Haffner, one of the dining halls at Bryn Mawr, offers specialty food bars that this semester includes Japanese food. Some international students say they eat at Haffner because it offers steamed Japanese rice at the Japanese bars. Others say the rice at Haffner is not the ‘authentic’ rice that they grew up with. Continue reading →